Temperature Control of High-Performance Multi-Core Platforms Using Convex Optimization

With technology advances, the number of cores integrated on a chip and
their speed of operation is increasing. This, in turn is leading to
a significant increase in chip temperature. Temperature gradients and
hot-spots not only affect the performance of the system, but also lead
to unreliable circuit operation and affect the life-time of the chip.
Meeting the temperature constraints and reducing the hot-spots are
critical for achieving reliable and efficient operation of complex
multi-core systems. In this work, we present Pro-Temp, a convex
optimization based method that pro-actively controls the temperature of
the cores, while minimizing the power consumption and satisfying
application performance constraints. The method guarantees that the
temperature of the cores are below a user-defined threshold at all
instances of operation, while also reducing the hot-spots. We perform
experiments on several realistic multi-core benchmarks, which show that
the proposed method guarantees that the cores never exceed the maximum
temperature limit, while matching the application performance requirements.
We compare this to traditional methods, where we find several
temperature violations during the operation of the system.